Beauraing in the winter of 1932

Beauraing is a small town in the province of Namur, in the heart of Walloon Belgium, on the banks of the Houille River. At the end of November 1932, it was a quiet, Catholic town, like so many Belgian towns of the time. Working-class families, shopkeepers, and nuns lived side by side in its streets, their daily lives marked by the economic crisis that followed the 1929 stock market crash.

On November 29, 1932, at six in the evening, five children went to pick up one of their daughters from the Sisters of Providence school, run by nuns. As they knocked on the garden gate, one of them looked up and saw something. What followed over the next 35 days would forever change Beauraing.

The five seers

The five children who starred in the Beauraing apparitions belonged to two neighboring families: the Voisins and the Degeimbres.

Family Neighbourhood: Fernande (15 years), Albert (11 years) and Gilberte (13 years). Albert was the only guy in the group. His father, Hector Voisin, was a railway and a practicing Catholic.

Family Degeimbre: Andrée (14 years) and his little sister Gilberte (9 years). Her mother, Mrs. Degeimbre, was a widow and skeptical. At first, when his daughter Andrée told him what he had seen, he slapped him and told him to stop making things up.

None of the five children had the profile of a mystic or a particularly devout child. They were ordinary children from an ordinary town. That is precisely one of the elements that the researchers considered in favor of the authenticity of the apparitions.

The first night: November 29, 1932

That afternoon in late November, Albert Voisin went to pick up his sister Fernande from the Sisters' school. He was accompanied by Andrée and Gilberte Degeimbre. While they waited, Albert looked up at the bridge that crossed over the railway line next to the school garden and saw a luminous figure walking. "The Virgin Mary!" he cried. The others looked and saw her too.

When Fernande Voisin left school, the others told her what they had seen. They looked in the same direction: the figure was still there. Fernande saw it too. Terrified and amazed at the same time, they ran home to tell their parents. The reactions ranged from disbelief and reprimands to laughter. But the next day, the five children returned.

The 33 apparitions: the complete cycle

Between November 29, 1932, and January 3, 1933, the five children had 33 apparitions in front of the Sisters' school garden, generally at six in the evening. The number 33—the years of Christ's life—was not chosen: it was simply the number of times the Virgin appeared before her final departure.

The figure the children described was a woman of extraordinary beauty, dressed in white, standing in the air or on the branches of a hawthorn bush, with a halo of light. In some apparitions, she wore a golden crown. Her eyes were an impossible blue, the children said. She smiled. She didn't speak much, but what she did say was direct and clear.

• November 29, 1932 First apparition: Albert Voisin sees a luminous figure. The five kids see her together when they knock on the school door.
• December 1932 The apparitions happen almost every night. The number of adult viewers accompanying children is growing but they see nothing. Children's ecstasy is examined by doctors.
• December 29, 1932 For the first time, the Virgin shows her heart: a heart of gold surrounded by rays of light. The children are overtaken.
• January 1, 1933 Our Lady says, "Pray always." The kids ask him who he is. He says, "I am the Immaculate Virgin."
• January 3, 1933 Last apparition. Our Lady says goodbye to every child individually. To Gilberte Voisin, the last to be visited, he shows his heart of gold and says, "Turn, goodbye." And he disappears forever.

"I am the Immaculate Virgin"

On January 1, 1933, Fernande Voisin asked the figure who it was. The response was: “I am the Immaculate Virgin.” This statement connected directly with the dogma proclaimed by Pius IX in 1854 and with the apparition at Lourdes in 1858, where the Virgin had appeared to Bernadette Soubirous with identical words: “Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou”—“I am the Immaculate Conception.”

The fact that the Virgin chose this title in Beauraing, precisely when the winds of Nazism and atheistic Communism were rising in Europe, was interpreted by many as a deliberate reminder of her identity. The Immaculate Conception was manifesting itself once again on the continent that had proclaimed its dogma 78 years earlier.

The heart of gold: the vision that defined Beauraing

The most distinctive element of the Beauraing apparitions, and the one that gives it its best-known title—Our Lady of the Golden Heart—was the vision of the heart that the Virgin showed to the children in the final apparitions. Fernande Voisin described it as “a luminous heart, of shining gold, surrounded by rays of light, like the Sacred Heart of Jesus but brighter.”

This symbol, the heart as the center of divine and maternal love, became the axis of the devotion that originated in Beauraing. Our Lady of the Golden Heart invited the faithful to trust in this maternal love, unconditionally, without any prior merits required.

"Do you love my Son? Do you love me? Sacrifice then. Bye."
- Our Lady's words to Fernande Voisin in the last apparition

Ecstasy: Medical Research

The Beauraing apparitions were the subject of one of the most rigorous medical studies in Marian history at that time. Several doctors, some of them non-believers, were invited to examine the children during the ecstasies. Their conclusions were perplexing:

During their ecstatic state, the children did not respond to external stimuli. Matches were lit under Fernande's hands: she did not react. Flashlights were shone directly into the children's eyes: their pupils did not constrict. Their heart and respiratory rates were normal. The children all stared at the same point with the exact same expression, as if following the movements of something that was moving, all in unison, without having agreed to do so.

Dr. Maistriaux, a physician from Beauraing who had attended the birth of several of the children and knew them well, declared: "I can find no medical explanation for what I have observed. These children are not in a hypnotic state, they are not feigning, and what they see is not hallucinatory in the clinical sense."

The sisters at the school: unexpected witnesses

The Sisters of Providence, who ran the school in front of whose garden the apparitions occurred, experienced the events with a mixture of astonishment and caution. The superior of the convent, Sister Valérie, was initially very skeptical. But the children's behavior during the ecstasies, which she observed closely on several occasions, gradually convinced her that something extraordinary was happening.

The sisters also witnessed something the researchers considered particularly significant: on several nights, when the children fell into ecstasies in the garden, a flash of light or an inexplicable movement was recorded in the top of the hawthorn tree. Not all the sisters saw it, but those who did described it used similar words without having consulted one another.

The approval of 1949 and the "Belgian Marian Year"

On July 2, 1949, Bishop André-Marie Charue of the Diocese of Namur issued the official declaration of authenticity for the Beauraing apparitions. The text was the result of more than fifteen years of meticulous investigation. The Church was in no hurry: it preferred certainty to speed.

The approval of Beauraing came three weeks before that of Banneux (August 22, 1949), its sister apparition 80 kilometers to the north. Two Belgian apparitions approved in the same year, by two different bishops and with independent investigations, was an unprecedented event in the history of the Church.

The five seers: their lives after Beauraing

The five children of Beauraing lived ordinary lives after the apparitions. None of them entered religious life, and none became a public figure in Catholicism. Fernande Voisin, the eldest and the one who received the last individual message, married and had children. She never sought media attention. Albert Voisin, the only son, died young, in 1954, which surprised many.

Gilberte Degeimbre, the youngest of the five (nine years old at the time of the apparitions), was the one who spoke most about her experiences in the later years of her life. In her later testimonies, decades later, she described the ecstasies as "leaving here and being somewhere completely different, full of light and peace." She died in 2015 at the age of 91, the last surviving of the five visionaries.

The Beauraing sanctuary today

The Beauraing sanctuary has become one of the main pilgrimage centers in Belgium and throughout Western Europe. A crypt and a basilica were built on the grounds of the former school of the Sisters of Providence. The hawthorn tree before which children fell into ecstasy has been preserved as a living relic of the site.

Every year, especially between May and October, thousands of pilgrims arrive in Beauraing from Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and beyond. The shrine has a special charism of welcoming people going through crises: loss, illness, spiritual quests. The Golden Heart of Beauraing has been adopted as a symbol of trust in Mary's maternal love precisely in moments when all else seems lost.

"Pray always."
- Our Lady of Beauraing, January 1, 1933